Culture and Anarchy in "Jacob's Room"
1977; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1208041
ISSN1548-9949
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoVirginia Woolf's own delight in Jacob's Room was that of an experimental artist finding at last a new and liberating form. Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Waves were to follow in triumphant sequence and were among the best of the spoils that Woolf brought home. figure is E. M. Forster's, spoken in the year of her death, looking back more in celebration than regret over a life he invited us all to regard as, finally, a happy one.' new form in Jacob's Room (1922)-a form anticipated in The Mark on the Wall, Kew Gardens, and other finger exercises of 1917, 1919, and 1920-releases, also, a critique of Western culture. fact has been mentioned in criticism, though never, I think, sufficiently elaborated on either in interpretations of the novel or in assessing the place it occupies in Woolf's oeuvre. To be sure, Jacob's Room shows similarities in technique and theme to the novels Woolf wrote before it, Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919). Still more strikingly, however, it achieves and expresses in its new form (with its rapidly shifting points of view, its narrative discontinuities, its oblique choice of incident) a pattern of attitudes that is also new both in range and decisiveness. Woolf wrote in her Diary on July 26, 1922, as she was anticipating the reviews of Jacob's Room, There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.2 My focus in this essay
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